Comments on: XCOM: Enemy Unknown adds multiplayer and it’s amazingly goodhttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2012/08/17/xcom-enemy-unknown-adds-multiplayer-and-its-amazingly-good/
Bay Area Arts and Entertainment BlogSat, 21 Feb 2015 19:39:00 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1By: toddhttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2012/08/17/xcom-enemy-unknown-adds-multiplayer-and-its-amazingly-good/#comment-156961
toddFri, 07 Sep 2012 00:38:58 +0000http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/?p=24803#comment-156961As a counterpoint, I played XCOM on the playstation with a controller and loved it. It did take a few hours to learn the complex control system, but once I did it didn’t distract from the gameplay.

I am not thrilled that they reduced the squad size and simplified the turn system, but it was done to speed up excruciatingly slow gameplay in the original. Don’t get me wrong, I loved agonizing over my strategy and most effective use of every last turn unit. I just can’t imagine anyone with the patience for an online opponent to do the same. From the gameplay I have seen, it appears the size of maps has been reduced to compensate for the smaller squad sizes. Hope of hopes? they include an option to play the single player campaign with turn units as an easter egg for beating the game.

IHMO, This XCOM bears a great resemblance to the original and holds the most promise of any title in the franchise since the original.

]]>By: A Leehttp://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2012/08/17/xcom-enemy-unknown-adds-multiplayer-and-its-amazingly-good/#comment-155740
A LeeWed, 29 Aug 2012 01:16:57 +0000http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/?p=24803#comment-155740I’ve played XCOM, and this new XCOM is no XCOM.

Don’t get me wrong, this new one will probably be a fun game. But it could have been so much more, and that is a tragedy. The main problem is that they had to dumb down the game for consoles, to make the game controllable from a gamepad. While they have attempted to justify their game design decisions as improvements, virtually all of them were forced by the shift to consoles.

The core game mechanic of tactical XCOM was the time-unit (TU). The TU system was simple and very robust. Every soldier had an allotment of TU each turn, that could be spent on a variety of actions, such as pulling a grenade from a belt or backpack, firing a weapon, reloading, moving, crouching, or looking around. Most importantly, it was important to leave a reserve of TUs at the end of the turn, so that during the alien movement phase, those reserve TUs could be automatically used as reaction fire. Rather than a rule-based system that says rocket-launchers cannot be fired and moved on the same turn, the TU cost would be so high that the soldier could do little else. It was a natural, intuitive system, but it could only be implemented on a mouse-and-keyboard setup. A console implementation would be drowning in menus.

This is just one of the many compromises made for the sake of consoles. The squads are limited to 4-6, rather than the 6-12+ of the original. This has an important gameplay impact. In the original XCOM, individual soldiers were very fragile and limited in capability. Even with the most advanced armor, they could still be killed by a single hit. This was acceptable, because losing a few soldiers would not cripple the entire squad. Also, since soldiers moved in fireteams of 2-4 soldiers, each soldier could be individually weak, but the fireteam could still be relatively capable. In the new XCOM, with so few soldiers in a squad, each soldier has to be an invulnerable super-soldier, and the loss of a single soldier is crippling.